THE gloves came off in the United States presidential election battle yesterday, with both candidates' camps launching savage personal attacks on their rivals.
Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate, repeated weekend allegations that Barack Obama sympathised with former terrorist Bill Ayers, saying of the Democratic candidate: "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a
former domestic terrorist. I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America – as the greatest source for good in the world."
Mr McCain stepped up the pressure, releasing a commercial accusing Mr Obama of making false accusations against US forces in Afghanistan.
Mr Obama hit back by issuing a 13-minute video, Keating Economics, highlighting Mr McCain's role in trying to shield a corrupt banker, Charles Keating, from a federal investigation that saw him jailed in the late 1980s.
Neither the Ayers nor Keating controversies are new. Mr Obama's tangential relationship with the self-confessed former terrorist was exposed in the primary campaign, and Mr McCain was publicly reprimanded for helping Keating by the Senate.
But both campaigns appear to have decided yesterday to go for the jugular, in what some have dubbed Mud Monday.
The McCain advert shows Mr Obama and footage from Afghanistan. The voiceover says: "Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are just air-raiding villages and killing civilians. How dishonourable." It refers to an election meeting last year at which Mr Obama said more troops were needed in the Afghan war to ensure "we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians".
Mr Obama's ad goes back to the 1980s and accuses his rival of following the same pattern as the current banking crisis, with senators giving bankers special favours in return for pay-offs.
The hostilities will put both men in snarling mood ahead of tonight's head-to-head televised debate, the second of three.
It comes with the polls showing Mr Obama stretching his lead. Results out yesterday give him ten-point leads in the big states of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and a seven-point lead in Ohio, and these are figures Mr McCain must reverse if he is to stay in contention.
WILLIAM AYERS
Obama tarnished by 'terror link'BARACK Obama's connection with Bill Ayers reminds Americans of the turbulence of the 1960s – of an idealism gone wrong for some, of communist fellow-travellers to others.
Radicalism was in the air, Vietnam was in the news, and while millions of young Americans took to the streets, Mr Ayers decided to go further. He helped found a group named the Weather Underground, often known as the Weathermen, after a Bob Dylan lyric: "You don't need a weatherman to know what way the wind blows."
In his determination to show America's public what way he wanted the wind to blow, he targeted federal institutions with nail bombs.
An explosion in late 1969 destroyed a Chicago police commemorative statue. When the city rebuilt the statue, Weather Underground blew it up again the following year.
There were bombings in New York, San Francisco and Washington, targeting police stations and army recruiting offices, but there were no casualties. A small bomb in the Pentagon cut a water pipe, flooded the situation room and cut off direct contact with the front in Vietnam.
Mr Ayers was named as one of the terrorists, but the campaign was stopped by the group itself when members of a cell blew themselves up while making a nail bomb in Greenwich Village, New York.
Mr Ayers and fellow founder Bernadine Dohrn, his wife, went underground, but turned themselves in 1980.
In return for his confession, Mr Ayers had bombing charges dropped and Ms Dohrn was given three years' probation. Since then, Mr Ayers has built himself a career as a professor at Chicago University, becoming an expert on educational reform.
Sarah Palin has insisted that Obama learned politics in Mr Ayers' living room, implying he supports Mr Ayers' former commitment to terrorism.
Both have served on the board of the same Chicago charity and live near each other in Chicago. Mr Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Mr Obama when Mr Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s, the event cited by Ms Palin.
Mr Ayers donated $200 (£115) for Obama's senate campaign in 2002.
Spokesmen say the men have not met for more than a year-and-a-half.
The former terrorist is ambiguous about whether he regrets his past. In 1995 he described himself as the last communist.
He insists his targets were buildings, not people, a point possibly lost on the terrified bystanders who experienced his attacks.
CHARLES H KEATING
McCain role in banking scandalTHE Charles Keating affair is an uneasy reminder to Americans of the scandal and chaos that plagued the country the last time the government had to bail out wayward banks.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration deregulated banks, allowing them to make far riskier loans with depositors' cash. At first, this freed up the economy and the United States boomed. But by the late 1980s, growing numbers of finance houses were in trouble after risky loans went sour.
One such was the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, whose chairman, Charles Keating, was a friend of Senator John McCain, of Arizona. Keating, who lived in the state, had given Mr McCain $112,000 (£65,000) for his Senate campaign, while Mr McCain's wife, Cindy, a brewing heiress, had sunk more than $300,000 into a shopping mall project with Keating.
When federal authorities began investigating Lincoln in 1987, Mr McCain, newly arrived in the Senate, joined four other senators, three Democrats and one Republican, in lobbying them to stop.
For a time, it worked: the authorities established the bank had unreported losses of $136 million in 1986, but did not order its takeover in 1989, at a cost to the taxpayer of $2 billion in paying guarantees to depositors who had lost their money.
The Lincoln collapse was one of 447 failures that left the taxpayer with a $500 billion bill, the biggest federal bail-out in US history – until now.
Keating spent four-and-a-half years in jail for fraud. The senators, nicknamed the Keating Five, were investigated by the FBI, then hauled before the Senate ethics committee, where Mr McCain famously said: "One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion."
After a nine-month investigation, the three senior senators were reprimanded, while Mr McCain and Democrat John Glenn, on account of their junior status, were admonished for improperly interfering with the federal investigation. They both stood for re-election, while the three senior senators all bowed out.
Lincoln shareholders were not so lucky: more than 23,000 were left with nothing, some after giving the bank their life savings.
The scandal became a symbol for millions of Americans of the way government had colluded with bankers in allowing risky gambles to be made with investors' money.
Mr McCain has since admitted that he had been in the wrong.
The full article contains 1213 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
